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Sinan Ülgen is Chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM) and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels. He is the author of the recent Carnegie Europe paper “A Threat-Based Strategy for NATO’s Southern Flank”.

I think creating economic stability through economic integration while devolving political autonomy to sub-state ethnically-based entities has the potential to for wide application in the region. It could ultimately prove a model for the Palestinian-Israel conflict and may provide a model for dealing with a fractured Syria and troubled Lebanon.

That Secretary of State Kerry and the US government are clueless to the potential of the situation surprises me not at all. The Washington Establishment is locked in the past.

We shouldn't forget that the Ottoman empire rulers were wise enough as to let ethnic and religious minorities enjoy their specific ways of life.
Only the advent of European inspired nationalism and the gradual dissolution of the imperial power (that induced in the rulers of those days the idea to search for a nationalistic rallying point) produced the Armenian and later the Kurdish tragedies.
I seems that practical reason is making a very welcome comeback.